Explore the March Issue

Follow us on Facebook

Fact-Checkers Wrong on Ryan GM Claim

The Associated Press and other fact-checkers are insisting that the line about the Janesville GM factory in Paul Ryan’s speech last night was inaccurate — and once again, the fact-checkers are wrong. Here’s the AP’s allegation against Ryan:

RYAN: Said Obama misled people in Ryan’s hometown of Janesville, Wis., by making them think a General Motors plant there threatened with closure could be saved. “A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: ‘I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.’ That’s what he said in 2008. Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year.”

THE FACTS: The plant halted production in December 2008, weeks before Obama took office and well before he enacted a more robust auto industry bailout that rescued GM and Chrysler and allowed the majority of their plants — though not the Janesville facility — to stay in operation. Ryan himself voted for an auto bailout under President George W. Bush that was designed to help GM, but he was a vocal critic of the one pushed through by Obama that has been widely credited with revitalizing both GM and Chrysler.

The AP might want to check back on its own reporting on the plant closure, starting with this article from April 19, 2009, headlined “GM plant in Janesville to close for good this week”:

Production at the General Motors plant in Janesville is scheduled to end for good this week.

About 1,200 employees were let go just before Christmas when GM ended SUV production at the plant.

Some 100 workers were retained to finish an order of small- to medium-duty trucks for Isuzu Motors Ltd.

Lee says most of those workers will be laid off Thursday. He says others will be kept on to help guide the plant’s shutdown.

The Janesville plant ended its SUV production line and laid off over 1,000 workers in December 2008, but the plant didn’t officially close. It continued to churn out an order of Isuzu trucks until April 2009, while the local union lobbied GM for a lifeline. In May, GM put the plant onto standby, meaning that it wasn’t completely shutting the door on it. There was some hope the plant would be able to resume production — and Wisconsin’s bipartisan congressional delegation, including Paul Ryan, scrambled to find a way to keep it alive — but it never happened.

To simply say that the plant “halted production” in December 2008, like AP does, is both inaccurate and misleading. It was more complicated than that. If the media wants to criticize Ryan for not being “nuanced” enough and failing to praise Obama for brilliantly saving GM, that’s fine. But Ryan’s comments weren’t inaccurate.